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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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ANS joins others in seeking to discuss SNF/HLW impasse
The American Nuclear Society joined seven other organizations to send a letter to Energy Secretary Christopher Wright on July 8, asking to meet with him to discuss “the restoration of a highly functioning program to meet DOE’s legal responsibility to manage and dispose of the nation’s commercial and legacy defense spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW).”
Bin Zhang, Jian Deng, Maolin Jing, Tao Xu, Xiaowei Jiang, Jianqiang Shan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 8 | August 2021 | Pages 853-863
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1861862
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The suppression pool is an important component in a boiling water reactor nuclear power plant. Under design-basis, loss-of-coolant accident conditions, pressure in the containment increases. Gas flows from the drywell to the wetwell after the normally submerged connecting vents between the drywell and the wetwell have been purged of water through a vent clearing process so that the suppression pool may prevent pressure in the containment from exceeding the designed pressure limit. To analyze such complicated thermal-hydraulic behavior of the suppression pool under a specific accident, an advanced reasonable model should be developed. The SPARC-90 model used in MELCOR calculates the mass and energy transfer between the bubbles of the injected gas and the suppression pool, which is affected by distance efficiency and subcooling efficiency. The dedicated vent flow model used in CONTAIN can well simulate the vent clearing time, that is, the time required for the liquid level on either side of the suppression pool to drop to the level at which the vent begins to clear. However, it is necessary and better to combine them into one integrated code. This paper presents a newly developed suppression pool model based on the self-developed severe accident analysis code Integrated Severe Accident Analysis (ISAA), which combines the advantages of the dedicated vent flow model and the SPARC-90 model to analyze the suppression pool’s thermal-hydraulic behavior. The simulation results of the developed suppression pool model shows reasonableness compared with the result in the CONTAIN 2.0 code manual. The good agreement between the simulation results and the analysis results from the COLUMBIA power station final safety analysis report demonstrates the rationality and effectiveness of the developed model, although future improvement is needed.